As Congress nears the end of its August recess, the health-care debate will undoubtedly become more impassioned, with the president having demanded that Congress present a bill ready for his signature by the end of the year. Politicians of all persuasions seek to paint the debate in symbolic political terms, but the debate is both more, and less, than Red versus Blue, Republican versus Democrat, Right versus Left.

Cheryl Miller

As Congress nears the end of its August recess, the health-care debate will undoubtedly become more impassioned, with the president having demanded that Congress present a bill ready for his signature by the end of the year. Politicians of all persuasions seek to paint the debate in symbolic political terms, but the debate is both more, and less, than Red versus Blue, Republican versus Democrat, Right versus Left.

A frequent argument is that, by removing the profit motive, the federal government, as through Medicare and Medicaid, does a more efficient job insuring health care than do private insurers.
Congressional Research Service estimates Medicare’s administrative costs at 2 percent of the total program costs, compared to 12 percent for HMOs, and 10 percent for private insurers. A study by the consulting firm Milliman and Robertson, however, estimates that when factoring in the hidden costs shifted to care providers, and the social costs of collecting taxes for funding,
Medicare and Medicaid actually spend 27 cents per dollar more on administration, compared to 16 cents per dollar spent by private insurers.

Another study, by Patricia Danzon, Ph.D., author of “Medical Malpractice: Theory, Evidence, and Public Policy,” estimates the cost of tax finance in Canada (an oft-touted model), to be at least 17 percent of claims. And Benjamin Zycher, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, calculates that the cost of a universal Medicare program would be twice as high as the administrative costs of universal private coverage.

Proponents of government-based health insurance point to some other government entities as examples of superlative performance, chiefly the Social Security program, the U.S. Postal Service and the Veterans Administration.

Consider that Social Security will pay more in benefits beginning in 2016 than it collects in taxes; trustees report that the trust fund will be depleted by 2037. Likewise, Medicare paid out more in benefits for hospital expenses than it collected in 2008, and trustees project the fund will be depleted by 2017.

According to the Government Accounting Office report in January 2009, the Postal Service (now a “revenue-neutral” quasi-private entity) finished the year 2008 with a $2.8 billion loss — even after cutting more than 50 million work hours.

Recently, the Veterans Administration was the object of scandalous headlines reporting alleged bonuses of $24 million to VA staff, while wounded veterans have faced hardship awaiting their disability checks. As with other government agencies, cuts in funding have been enacted at the whim of Congress; nor would a national health care option be immune to such changes.

And then there are the governments of our individual states. Based on a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the combined budget gaps projected by states for the next two fiscal years are estimated to total at least $350 billion. We are not teetering on the brink of insolvency, we are already there.

Some proponents of health care reform insist the U.S. is inferior to the rest of the civilized world because it does not mandate universal coverage. But in fact, just the opposite is true: The greater the recognition and protection of individual rights — including the right not to carry health insurance, or pay for that of anyone else — the more advanced the nation.

The principles on which the United States was founded — the right of all men to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — recognize the sovereign nature of the individual; one is not to be sacrificed to the many. The individual is the engine of progress, not the collective. The moral duty of the individual is to be responsible for himself, not to be a slave to others. If our nation mandates universal health coverage, it will be bankrupt morally, as well as financially.